Owaranakatta

by Fox in the Stars

In Soujiro's wanderings, he runs into a strangerbut this stranger knows him all too well, and Soujiro finds that leaving his past behind is not even as simple a choice as he had thought.

Owaranakatta
"It isn't over"

Rurouni Kenshin Fanfiction
by Laura Gilkey

Author's Note:
While it's fairly loosely-stitched at present, my Soujiro fanfics do form a continuity. They can be read and enjoyed as stand-alones, but for optimum effect, I recommend reading them in chronological order, as follows:
Life's Battles
Ikura desu ka
Okaerinasai
Owaranakatta (you are here)
Fuyu no Hiakari
Fuyumatsu

*

Red-brown leaves blew around the legs of the restaurant's outdoor tables. They looked just about due to be taken inside and put away for the winter, but Soujiro still smiled at the chance to sit and eat outdoors with a view of the autumn palette of leaves fringing the outskirts of the town.

And apparently he wasn't the only one, either. On one of the tables, a peddler had planted his box of sundries—drawers of odd baubles, cheap jewelry and toys, and atop it a rack of sorts, holding an assortment of furin(1) left over from summer. The peddler was an older man, with greying, uncut hair under a wide bamboo hat, and he wore his faded kimono tucked into the back of his obi, leaving his legs free in long field pants and sandals. At the moment he was showing a young couple a carved cameo pendant, an image of a Western lady with swirling hair.

"Oh, it's lovely!" the young lady said. Her belly pushed forward despite her thin figure, and she was already holding a doll.

"Well, the mother-to-be deserves something too, right?" her husband said. "How much for that and the doll?"

"Man after my own heart!" the peddler said. "That'll be..."

Soujiro watched them pay and walk away smiling as he found himself a seat. The peddler turned to him, gave a start, and rushed over. "Ah, sir!"

"I'm afraid I can't use anything right now," Soujiro said politely. No matter how pleasant the salesman, he had enough trouble keeping money for food and lodgings that sleeping in a bed was often pushed out of his budget, let alone buying trinkets.

"Well, you don't look the sort for jewelry, and I'd say you're too old for toys," the peddler said. "You don't want a windchime?"

"I don't have a house."

The man made a show of stroking his chin and then pointing his finger in an 'ah-hah!' gesture. "I bet I know what you'd like." He went back to his box, pulled out a drawer, and sat down across from Soujiro, pushing it across the table to him back-end first.

Soujiro's face fell. The rear compartment of the drawer which the man was showing him was full of decorative tsuba(2). He knows I'm a swordsman... Looking up, he saw a knowing look in the man's eye. Does he know who I am? "I... I'm sorry, I really can't use anything..."

Another man had emerged from the building and walked up to them. "Now, hey, I told you you could sell here if you didn't harass my customers!"

"Terribly sorry!" the peddler said, and turned to Soujiro. "I guess you didn't recognize me."

"Recognize you?"

"We've met before, or at least I've met you. Come now, let me buy you lunch."

Soujiro didn't like this. That peddler still wore a shamelessly knowing look—he was sure the man knew who he was. Was he trying to say so? Or was he wearing that look accidentally, planning something? If the proprietor let him sell his wares here, they might be conspiring together. If they arranged to drug his food and turn him in to the police, it'd be worth their while; the price on his head was huge. "I'm sorry," he said, getting up. "I really need to be going."

He heard the restaurant-man's voice behind him as he hurried off. "That's it! You just cost me a customer! Take your box of junk and get out of here!"

Soujiro turned to look as the man closed up his box, hefted it by shoulder-straps onto his back and left the restaurant's yard—heading straight for him and flashing him a broad smile. He turned away and started walking down the road toward the town at a brisk pace, but he wasn't willing to run for this, and he heard the clatters of the baubles and protesting jingles from the furin as the peddler ran to catch up and fell into step beside him.

"Sorry if I alarmed you," the man said. "Can't be too careful these days, I know."

He didn't answer.

"I know you don't know me," he went on, "but we really have met before. At the shrine in Kyoto, I believe."

Soujiro didn't freeze, but he slowed his gait suddenly. 'At the shrine in Kyoto'... That was one of the codes the informants used to use...

"This past summer, wasn't it? The last time you were there?"

He turned to face the peddler, finally. "Who are you?"

"Okawara Akio, at your service," the man said—walking beside him, he stood a head taller than Soujiro. "And you?"

Somehow, Soujiro had never been good with aliases. "Um, I thought you knew me."

Akio looked around to see that the road was quite empty before answering in a low voice. "I didn't think you'd want me to say it, Seta-sama."

A long pause.

"Can I buy you lunch now?" Akio asked.

It was true. This man had been part of Shishio's network of informers, and he was recognizing Soujiro as his superior, trying to talk to him. "Okay," he said, "but only if I pick the place."

"Long as it's not too expensive," Akio said.

**********

After a lunch of cheap fried rice and a little boy buying a hair-comb for his mother's birthday, Akio insisted on bringing Soujiro to his house. It was a wooden shack some way out of town, nestled amid rice fields that stretched out flat and brown in all directions and offered little cover for potential eavesdroppers. The house also had several more furin hanging along the eaves. Soujiro had become more comfortable since his fears at the first restaurant, and smiled at them; he thought Akio must really like them.

He ushered Soujiro into the house first—it was just one room with a cooking fireplace in the middle. Stacked around most of the walls were the wares of Akio's trade in varying states of repair, but in one corner were clustered the futon, a house-shrine, and in a prominent place, a sword-stand holding an old katana and wakizashi.

"Ah, privacy at last!" Akio exclaimed, carefully shrugging off his box and setting it down. "Seta-sama!"

Soujiro turned to see Akio kowtow to him, so low that his forehead touched the floor. "Ah, Okawara-san, you don't have to do that!" he protested with a laugh.

"Oh, nonsense!" Akio insisted, rising. "I'm so glad I found you! I heard you were missing, but when you hear these things through government sources, you never know what they might be covering up." As he spoke, he went over by the futon, looking over a few painted objects. "These are ready to go," he said, picking up a flowered hair-comb and a small wooden trinket-box and putting them in his store of merchandise before returning to a touched-up doll. "And you're ready for your face."

"Government sources?" Soujiro questioned. He sat in front of where Akio was opening up pots of paint, which put him right next to the sword-stand, and he looked over at it.

"Feel free to look at them if you want to," Akio said. "They belonged to my grandfather, back in the days when he was a samurai. I had to sell the armor, but I'm not giving up his swords. Anyway, you knew we had our moles. Still do a few, although now most of them have been captured or had to go into hiding."

Soujiro picked up the katana as he spoke and unsheathed a few inches of it. It was a strange sensation, so habitual and yet unfamiliar; by this time, he hadn't handled a sword in months, although the touch of the threadbare wrappings on the handle summoned back every shade of knowledge of what to do with one. The sensation was slightly scary, but also pleasantly thrilling. Not this sword, though. The blade was worn and rusty, although... "This was a good sword back then," Soujiro said.

"Weren't they all?" Akio replied. "Really, though, we were terribly afraid they had you, and just didn't want anyone to know what they were doing to you, or that you were dead, maybe killed yourself like Houji, and they just never found you..."

Soujiro's smile fell away as he snapped the sword shut and replaced it numbly on the stand. "Houji!? He's dead!? I thought he went to the police..."

"He did," Akio said. "But when it turned out the government was going to cover up the whole thing, he killed himself in prison. They say he left a manifesto written on the wall in his own blood."

"Stop it," Soujiro said, with his hand over his mouth.

"You didn't know?"

He shook his head slowly, and spoke in a soft, hollowed-out voice. "I knew about Shishio-san and Yumi-san, and Usui... Everybody else...?"

Akio returned to sketching in the doll's face with thinned ink. "The rest of the Juppon Gatana are alive as far as I know," he said. "Anji got 25 years in prison on Hokkaido, Chou's a private investigator in Kyoto, working with the police... In fact, the goverment hired everybody else for something. Henya's doing some sort of flying reconnaissance, Saizuchi's a negotiator, Kamatari's a spy... They're even using that giant of Saizuchi's—"

"—Fuji."

"Well, they're even using him for something."

"Iwanbou?" Soujiro asked.

"Ah, keep forgetting about him. Nobody's seen him since the day everything came apart... If we could rebuild things, maybe he'd turn up again, and the others might come back to our side."

"Kamatari-san would," Soujiro said. "I don't know about anyone else."

"Unfortunately, Kamatari's in America," Akio said. "It's been hard times since we lost Shishio-sama, hasn't it? I remember you used to always be smiling..."

"Eh? I did, didn't I...?" Soujiro touched his own cheek, suddenly aware of his mouth weighted down by the news. His voice fell so soft Akio might not even hear it. "But, I wasn't really..."

"But it could be worse, right?" Akio laughed as he touched a brush of red paint to the doll's carved lips. "There's still hope, especially having you still with us."

Soujiro gave a start. "Areh?(3) Me!? Wha...?"

"Well, you're here, and you're free."

"But I don't have anything to do with it!"

Akio started, accidentally streaking the paintbrush across the doll's face. "What do you mean!? You were the second-in-command!"

"I was the 'right hand.' It's not the same thing." Shishio had once said—and not bothering to spare Soujiro's ears, either—that 'right hand' did not mean 'second-in-command' or 'most valued supporter;' it meant 'direct instrument of my will.' If one could look past the deadly nature of the work, Soujiro's job had been essentially secretarial.(4)

"You were second only to Shishio-sama, either way. And you're the only one left to bring us back from this! Listen, there are more of us left than you realize, but without Shishio-sama, nobody knows what to do! Seta-sama, we need you to lead us!"

"No!" Soujiro insisted, shocked at the suggestion. "I could never... Besides, I'm all through with that! I'm not going to fight for Shishio-san anymore."

Akio looked at the streak on the doll's face and set it and the paintbrush aside. He sat for a long moment in sullen silence. "Are you afraid of the police?" he asked bitterly. "Is that it?"

"I don't want any trouble with them, but that's not the reason," Soujiro said. "When I was with Shishio-san, I killed so many people... I took what I wanted from them with pain and fear... I didn't really want to, and when I see people do that now, I hate it, but Shishio-san said that was how it was, so I acted that way and smiled for ten years before I realized I didn't like it. I never want to live like that again. I don't want to fight anymore... Sometimes, going so long without a sword... It feels like cutting out a piece of my heart. But I don't want to be a killer anymore..."

"So you're just going to spend your life running away from the police?"

"I guess so. Right now I just want to live my life."

"And to hell with the rest of us, huh!?" Akio shouted suddenly. "We all swore our allegiance to you, put our hopes in you! Now you don't want the responsibility anymore, so too bad for us, eh!?"

"That was Shishio-san, not me!" Soujiro cried. "And he's dead! And I gave him ten years of my life! I listened to everything he said and nothing my own heart said, and now I have all this blood on my hands, and police chasing me, and a price on my head enough to make somebody rich! I'll be paying for what I did for the rest of my life! So don't you start saying I owe you anything!" Soujiro was feeling the heat of blood in his face before he was done, and a few minutes staggered past in that hot silence; he and Akio couldn't meet each other's eyes.

"So that's it, then," Akio said at last. "It's over."

"Yes."

A few more moments of silence.

Akio got up, crossed the room, and picked up his box again. "I'm going out again. I'll be back this evening," he said, and left the house without another word.

**********

Soujiro didn't want to set off wandering again and leave Akio to wonder where he'd gone, but he didn't want to disturb his things without permission—except that he put the cover back on the red paint so that it wouldn't dry up and cleaned the paintbrush that Akio had left.

But that was all he did, and Akio was staying out as long as it was light. Finally, Soujiro lay down on the plank floor, sleepy with boredom, and listened to the breeze sigh against the house and ring all the windchimes.

What did someone like this need with Shishio's bloody philosophy, anyway? If an era of survival of the fittest had begun, Akio's rusty heirloom swords wouldn't have lasted long. His Samurai pride wouldn't have saved him from someone like Tenken no Soujiro, a bastard son who didn't truly know a thing about pride or honor. Soujiro could even envy Akio, in fact. He didn't seem to have killed anyone, or done anything he was ashamed of. He had people in town who were happy to see him with his box of affordable pleasances. He had a home hung with windchimes. He wasn't a fugitive...

"What does he want with me, anyway?" Soujiro asked the doll, who lay on the floor facing him with her eyes just sketched in and a streak of red paint from her lips falling down her chin like blood.

That morbid connection reminded him of Houji, and he rolled over to get away from the sight of it. The disquiet of his mind kept him awake, but finally he closed his eyes. Taking in the news about everyone and his earlier burst of temper had been more tiring than half a day's walk, and there was nothing else to do.

**********

Soujiro was roused from sleep by a familiar metallic chink, and opened his eyes to see the wall of Akio's house, lit by a candle and cluttered with items that threw long shadows of the prevailing night darkness. At the hiss of a sword being drawn, he sat up and turned—Akio was behind him, in his seat from the afternoon, and had his old wakizashi off the sword-rack. He set its sheath aside and lay it across his lap, where it shone granulated gold candlelight.

"Ah, Okawara-san," Soujiro said with a smile, rubbing the sleep out of one eye. "What is it?"

"Oh, I'm sorry if I startled you with this," he said, gesturing to the sword. "It's nothing, really." As Soujiro watched him, his eyes were downcast, and he was breathing strangely, slow and deep as if each breath were deeply intended.

"Okawara-san? Is something wrong?"

Akio took a deep breath, let it go, and took another one before he spoke. "Well, if Seta-sama says it's over, it really must be. So..."

He lifted the sword, with the heel of his hand toward the tsuba and blade. When Soujiro realized what he was doing, it gave him such a shock that the wakizashi was already pointed at Akio's stomach before he could move.

"No!!!" Unthinking almost as a reflex, he braced one foot and sprang forward. His left hand, open, hit Akio in the ribs, and with his right hand he seized the blade and pushed it away to the side—in time. The half-dulled point just snagged against the fabric of Akio's kimono. Soujiro was so relieved to realize it that he completely forgot the mistake he'd made in his panic for the split-second before he shoved the blade into his own left arm. He screamed in pain worse than that of a new, sharp sword as the rusty edge tore rather than sliced into his flesh.

"Seta-sama!" Akio cried, letting go of the sword. Only then did Soujiro dare to put it down and clutch his arm with his right hand, which was also bleeding from having gripped the blade. Akio took him by the shoulders as he curled around his wound. "Are you all right?"

"Why did you do that!?" Soujiro shouted. He had to take several deep breaths through his teeth to calm himself. The burning pain rang through every corner of his mind, along with the shock of Akio's attempted suicide, so loudly that tears ran down his face, and he barely knew what was happening. Rather than answering his question, Akio unbuttoned his cuff and pushed up his sleeve, which was stained with blood, all the way through the shirtsleeve to the kimono. Pushing it away left a blotted smear of red, replaced quickly by streams of blood that flowed freely from the wound and glowed scarlet against his skin in the flickering candlelight.

Akio pushed a cloth into his hand. "Here, hold it with this."

As Soujiro took the cloth and pressed it against his arm, he was finally able to look up at Akio, who avoided his tear-filled gaze. "Why would you want to die?" Soujiro asked.

"Isn't that obvious?"

He shook his head, the gesture tightened by the pain.

Akio sighed hotly. "Look at me!" he said. "My grandfather was a Samurai, and now I sell anything pretty I can buy, and when I can't do that, I patch up the trash other people throw away and ask them to buy it back!" He stared down at his hands draped in his lap. "The only kind of pride that matters anymore is the kind you can buy with money, and that's something I'll never have. Working for Shishio-sama, I felt like I was doing something brave, to make a difference, to make that not true anymore... But now that's over... If my ancestors could see me, they'd disown me. I couldn't even commit an honorable suicide; I just ended up hurting someone else..."

Soujiro stared at him for a long moment, sniffling and unsure what to say. "I don't think it's that bad."

Akio glared at him. "You don't know what it's like, for someone like me."

"So you think I should be proud?" Soujiro asked. "I'm the bastard son of a merchant family, and I don't have any money, either, anymore."

"Yes, but you were..."

"I did a lot of things I'm ashamed of," Soujiro said. "But you were doing what you wanted to and believed in. You should be more proud than me."

"But that's over now! You said it yourself. Now I'm just a poor peddler," Akio said. "What's the point of me going on, if that's all I'll ever be?"

"Would you rather be an assassin, like I was? I killed people and hurt them and destroyed beautiful things. You fix beautiful things and make people happy. That's something you can be proud of."

Akio didn't look up at him. "I'll get some bandages and take care of that," he said, crossed the room, and began rifling through boxes.

Soujiro sat and waited for him, still sniffling tears. What he was saying wasn't getting through, and he didn't know how to get through to Akio. He wished he knew something to tell this man, to show him the truth and save him, but how could he? He was barely starting to learn those things himself. It seemed so tragic and misguided, that such a kind person would have placed his hopes in Shishio, but it had happened, and it would take a lot more than a word from Soujiro to undo it. Right now, Akio must feel like a Samurai who had lost his lord, and everyone knew what happened then(5), since Soujiro wasn't about to accept Shishio's title. He'd said all he could about that that afternoon. I never want to live like that again. I don't want to do that anymore. Saying that the strong can walk on the weak and run the world any way they want, even if it's—

Wait. Any way they want? Maybe... Maybe Soujiro didn't want to live his life that way, but certainly he didn't want to leave Akio here to kill himself...

The bleeding had tapered off by the time Akio returned with bandages, water, and some herbal concoction. The cloth was soaked with blood, but the cut on his arm wasn't as deep as that made it seem, and Akio washed it and bound it up with medicine and bandages. Soujiro watched him thoughtfully as he fastened off the bandage and pulled the sleeve back into place.

"Okawara-san," he said, as Akio tended to his right hand with a grim face.

"Yes?"

"You believed in Shishio-san's way, right?"

"Of course."

"He said that the strongest would rule. He was the strongest, and I was next after him. Did you know that?"

Akio nodded.

"So now that he's gone, as the next srongest, I'm the one to succeed him, and if you don't follow me, then you're betraying Shishio-san's way."

"That's what I was saying earlier," Akio protested. "But you said—"

"Is that any way to talk to your leader?" Soujiro asked.

Akio blinked at him, and a hint of comprehension started across his face. "No, sir."

"Good. Now I'm going to give you my new orders. Your job is to pass information, like always, so make sure everyone else gets my message, all right?"

"Yes sir," Akio said.

Soujiro waited for him to tie off the bandage and sit back, and he looked Akio in the eyes as he spoke. "All those of us who are still alive and still free, there's hope for us," he said, "but not if we give up, if we commit suicide or throw away our lives in hopeless fights. So I'm ordering everyone to live as long as they can, to put away whatever anger and defeat they're feeling, and to live their lives with happiness and pride. If we act contented, no one will suspect us, and as long as we're alive, we haven't been defeated." Soujiro smiled to see Akio looking at him—still his face was sad, his eyes sparkled, but he wore at the same time a tight but honest smile that said he understood.

"Will you give that order to everyone?" Soujiro asked with a smile.

"It shall be done, Seta-sama," Akio replied, and kowtowed before him.

**********

Akio lent Soujiro a nemaki far too big for him, which he slept in the rest of the night and sat around the house in the following morning while Akio—who insisted on doing all the work for "Seta-sama"—washed the blood out of his clothes, dried them by the fireplace, and patched up the left sleeves of his shirt and kimono. As he sat there, Soujiro noticed that while he'd been asleep, Akio had neatly folded the cloth with his blood on it and placed it on the house-altar. To Soujiro, the gesture seemed encouraging rather than morbid.

When his clothes were ready, Soujiro got dressed. "I really should be going now."

"I understand," Akio said. "If you hang around here too long, it could look suspicious. An informant needs to maintain his cover, after all."

"And I'd hate to lose one like you," Soujiro added.

"Before you go, though..." Akio pulled that drawer out of his portable box again and offered Soujiro the compartment of tsuba. "Please, take one, as a gesture of my loyalty. And so you don't forget too much."

Soujiro smiled at him and picked out one with an image of leafy branches, surrounding the blade-socket with their graceful, knobby angles. "Thank you very much."

"It's no trouble for you, Seta-sama."

"Well, then, goodbye," Soujiro said, crossing to the door.

"Goodbye, and safe journey!"

On the way out, Soujiro succumbed to temptation and tapped one of the furin to make it ring, and as he walked away, a breeze followed on his heels and the bells all sang him a farewell. Looking back at them, he saw Akio waving from the doorway, and waved back before continuing down the path.

When he reached the larger road that separated the rice fields from trees, he used the morning sun in the east to point himself north again, and set out walking toward the distant horizon with the sun on his right-hand side.

Owari

Footnotes:

(1) Furin: a windchime made of glass, metal, pottery, or bamboo, often seen in anime (thanks to Riesz Fenrir for providing the term).

(2) Tsuba: the guard of a Japanese sword.

(3) "Areh?" is Soujiro's own preferred "Huh?" noise. Well, that and "eh?"

(4) It might break the flow a bit, but when that realization hit me, I couldn't resist putting it in. As a matter of fact, I looked it up in my Merriam-Webster, and...
Secretary: 1: one employed to handle correspondence and manage routine and detail work for a superior.
That was even a bit more accurate than I was prepared for. Yeah, deliver the messages, do the little things that need done, kill the little people who need killed, have the swordfights that aren't worth Shishio-san's time...

(5) That is, ritual suicide.